The Brain’s Empathy Gap

Can mapping neural pathways help us make friends with our enemies?

CreditCreditArtwork by Stephen Doyle

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By Jeneen Interlandi

March 19, 2015

Nyiregyhaza (pronounced NEAR-re-cha-za) is a medium-size city tucked into the northeastern corner of Hungary, about 60 miles from the Ukrainian border. It has a world-class zoo, several museums and universities and a new Lego Factory. It also has two Roma settlements, or “Gypsy ghettos.” The larger of these settlements is Gusev, a crumbling 19th-century military barracks separated from the city proper by a railway station and a partly defunct industrial zone. Gusev is home to more than 1,000 Roma. Its chief amenities include a small grocery store and a playground equipped with a lone seesaw and a swingless swing set. There’s also a freshly painted elementary school, where approximately 60 students are currently enrolled. Almost all those students are Roma and almost all of them live in Gusev.

Officially, most of the schools in Nyiregyhaza are integrated. Roma students have access to the same facilities as non-Roma students, and the ethnic balance of any given facility largely reflects the ethnic balance of the neighborhoods it serves. In practice, things are muddier. While many families in Gusev have been assigned to perfectly reputable schools, there is no busing program, and most schools are not within walking distance. For families living on just 60,000 forints ($205) a month, the schools are also too expensive to reach by public transit. “Everything is fine on paper,” Adel Kegye, an attorney with the Chance for Children Foundation (C.F.C.F.), told me when I visited Hungary this past fall. “But in reality, they make it very hard for the Roma to go anywhere but the settlement school.”

In 2007, the municipality closed the Gusev school and began a busing program, as part of a larger effort to integrate the Roma into Hungarian society. But the program was short-lived, in part because of resistance from the community. Non-Roma children bullied, teased and ostracized Roma students, and non-Roma parents began pulling their children out of schools that took in too many Roma. In 2011, the busing program was discontinued and the settlement school was reopened under the direction of the Greek Catholic Church. That same year, C.F.C.F. filed a lawsuit charging the church and the municipality with racial segregation. “The church has this totally modern school, with a brand-new swimming pool, right in the center of the city,” Kegye said. “Why can’t the kids from Gusev go to that school?”

Nyiregyhaza is by no means the only city to stand accused of such practices. C.F.C.F. has filed similar lawsuits throughout Hungary, and there are cases pending in Romania, the Czech Republic and elsewhere. But the Gusev case has attracted attention, in part because of the courtroom spectacle it has created. In 2013, Hungary’s minister of human resources, Zoltan Balog, testified on behalf of the Gusev school, claiming it offered Roma students a chance at social “catch-up” — the opportunity to develop the basic social and academic skills needed to join mainstream society. The school’s principal also took the stand, testifying that the Roma were infested with lice and that some had never used a fork. When asked by the presiding judge if room could be made for Roma children in the church’s other, nicer school, a priest replied that perhaps they could clear some space in the attic. When pressed, he said that mixing Roma children with non-Roma children would be “harmful” to the former. In February 2014, the court sided with C.F.C.F., ordering the Gusev school to stop accepting new students and ruling that it amounted to segregation. When I visited this fall, the Gusev school was appealing the judge’s decision, claiming it was better for the Roma to keep the school open. In the meantime, it had welcomed yet another incoming class.

Governments and nongovernmental organizations have spent decades perfecting the art of collective persuasion — getting people to do things that are good for them and for society. They have persuaded us to eat more vegetables and to wear our seatbelts, to walk for cures and to give to charity. What has not come so easily is persuading us to identify with — or even tolerate — people we perceive as outsiders. This is especially true when those outsiders form an entire community. A Facebook page devoted to individual portraits and the stories behind them might trigger an outpouring of donations for a “failing” public school in a blighted neighborhood. And the killing of a single unarmed black teenager might prompt thousands to protest in the streets. But social policies that address the problems behind individual fates — programs to combat poverty or racial bias in policing — remain as polarizing as ever.

While social and economic factors account for some of what divides us into warring camps, psychologists since Freud have suspected that something more fundamental is at work. In 1963, the Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram famously showed that average people were capable of inflicting grievous harm on one another — in this case, administering what they believed were powerful electric shocks — if they thought they were following the orders of a superior. A few years later, in an equally famous experiment, the Stanford researcher Philip Zimbardo had subjects play prisoners and wardens and showed that context can be far more powerful than our own values and personality traits in determining how we treat other people. Together, the studies are perhaps the most emblematic of a generation of psychology research into the social cues that determine how one group treats another. What role does group identity play? Does authority make us passive or just reinforce our belief that we are right? How much of our empathy is innate and how much is instilled in us by our environment?

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Emile Bruneau at the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department at M.I.T.CreditMatthew Monteith for The New York Times

In the past two decades, with the advent of f.M.R.I. technology, neuroscientists also began to tackle such questions. Emile Bruneau, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has spent the past seven years studying intractable conflicts around the world. He has looked at Israelis and Palestinians in Israel and the West Bank, Mexican immigrants and Americans along the Arizona border and Democrats and Republicans across the United States. By supplementing psychological experiments with brain scans, he is trying to map when and how our ability to empathize with one another break down, in hopes of finding a way to build it back up.

This past fall, he traveled to Budapest. The struggle to integrate the Roma reminded Bruneau of the fierce opposition that greeted Brown v. Board of Education: In each case, the resistance to desegregation was forceful enough to trump national law. “I keep coming back to the same basic question,” he told me one evening at a restaurant along the Danube. “If we knew then what we know now, could we have done any better?”

In recent years, neuroscientists have begun to map empathy’s pathways in the brain. We know that the ability to identify other people’s thoughts and feelings as separate from our own (what psychologists refer to as having a “theory of mind”) is associated with a handful of interconnected brain regions known collectively as the “theory-of-mind network.” And we’ve begun to pin specific tasks — like identifying other people’s mental states, or making moral judgments about their actions — to specific parts of this network.

But the picture remains incomplete. We still need to map a host of other empathy-related tasks — like judging the reasonableness of people’s arguments and sympathizing with their mental and emotional states — to specific brain regions. And then we need to figure out how these neural flashes translate into actual behavior: Why does understanding what someone else feels not always translate to being concerned with their welfare? Why is empathizing across groups so much more difficult? And what, if anything, can be done to change that calculus?

So far, Bruneau says, the link between f.M.R.I. data and behavior has been tenuous. Many f.M.R.I. studies on empathy involve scanning subjects’ brains while they look at images of hands slammed in doors or of faces poked with needles. Scientists have shown that the same brain regions light up when you watch such things happen to someone else as when you experience them or imagine them happening to you. “To me, that’s not empathy,” Bruneau says. “It’s what you do with that information that determines whether it’s empathy or not.” A psychopath might demonstrate the same neural flashes in response to the same painful images but experience glee instead of distress.

Similarly, stronger neural activity might correlate with how relevant a group or individual is to us, not what we feel for them. In a 2012 study, Bruneau showed that Arabs and Israelis displayed equal amounts of neural activity in their theory-of-mind regions when they read articles about their own group’s suffering as when they read about the other group’s suffering. But when they read about the suffering of South Americans — a group with whom they were not in direct conflict — their theory-of-mind regions quieted down. As far as the brain is concerned, he says, the opposite of love might not be hate but indifference.

In Hungary, Bruneau was trying to find a way to link what he observed in the field with what we know about how empathy works in our brains. “We must have learned something in the past 60 years,” he said. “I think we have an opportunity to put that knowledge to use now, to help the efforts underway here.”

At 42, Bruneau has a young face and a laid-back manner that betrays his self-described California hippie upbringing and that most likely served him well in his early career as a high-school biology teacher. His first formal experience in conflict resolution came when he was 24 and volunteering at a summer camp for Catholic and Protestant boys in Belfast. In an effort to build friendships between the two groups, the camp organizer, an American nonprofit, invited 250 children between the ages of 6 and 14 to bunk together for three weeks, all in the same large room. There were no planned activities or events. One volunteer was an artist who wanted to help the children design murals; another was a jazz musician who offered music therapy. But mainly the volunteer counselors, all in their early 20s, were left to improvise. “Everyone’s heart was in the right place,” Bruneau told me when I visited his office at M.I.T. this fall. “But nobody had any clue what they were doing.”

At first he thought things were going pretty well. Some Protestant boys built what seemed like genuine friendships with some Catholic boys. But on the last day of the program — after three weeks of nature walks, impromptu dialogues and trust-building exercises — a fight broke out between two participants that quickly devolved into a full-scale, 250-child brawl: Catholics against Protestants. Bruneau was startled. He knew the children to be both kind and empathetic toward one another. But those instincts were overridden by something much more powerful. He left Ireland wondering if peace-building initiatives were doing more harm than good, and if there was any way to make them better.

He spent the next few years traveling. He had already been to South Africa for the fall of apartheid. Now he made his way to Sri Lanka, landing at the Colombo airport just hours before it was attacked by the Tamil Tigers, then spent the next several weeks trailing two journalist friends through the countryside as they interviewed people on both sides of the conflict. Here, as in Ireland, otherwise-reasonable people could not bring themselves to consider the opposing side’s perspective, and as a result could not muster compassion for their suffering.

He returned to the States, settling in Ann Arbor, Mich., where he completed a Ph.D. in molecular biology. But he kept thinking about the conflicts he had witnessed, and about the failed peace-building initiatives. What struck him most were the similarities: the ideological motivations, the deep-rooted psychological biases and the careful way that people apportioned their empathy. The questions he most wanted to answer were not about the individual molecules he was studying in the lab but about how people interacted with others. So, with his Ph.D. complete, he abandoned molecular biology and talked his way into a cognitive neuroscience lab at M.I.T. “I wanted the research I was doing to match the stuff I was thinking about,” he says. “And I just felt more and more that the most relevant level of analysis for generating social change was the psychological level.”

He started looking into conflict-intervention programs and discovered that there were hundreds more like the one he volunteered for in Ireland, and that hardly any of them had been scientifically validated. No one was really checking to see if the programs accomplished their stated goals, or even if their stated goals were the best ones for achieving the desired outcomes. “They have all these very straightforward metrics like building trust, and building empathy, that sound totally reasonable,” Bruneau says. “But it turns out that a lot of those common-sense approaches can be way off-base.”

Increasing empathy seemed to be a key goal of every conflict-resolution program he looked at; he thought this reflected a misconception about the type of people who engage in political violence. “If Hollywood is to be believed, they’re all sociopaths,” he says. “But that’s not the reality. Suicide bombers tend to be characterized by, if anything, very high levels of empathy. Wafa Idris, the first Palestinian woman suicide bomber, was a volunteer paramedic during the second Intifada.”

Bruneau developed a theory to explain this paradox: When considering an enemy, the mind generates an “empathy gap.” It mutes the empathy signal, and that muting prevents us from putting ourselves in the perceived enemy’s shoes. He couldn’t yet guess at the mechanism behind the phenomenon, but he hypothesized that it had nothing to do with how empathetic a person was by nature. Even the most deeply empathetic people could mute their empathy signals under the right circumstances. And it was difficult to determine what role empathy played in group conflicts. Increasing empathy might be great at improving pro-social behavior among individuals, but if a program succeeded in boosting an individual’s empathy for his or her own group, he reasoned, it might actually increase hostility toward the enemy.

To test these ideas in the lab, he divided a group of volunteers into two teams, each with its own colors and logo, and then pitted them against each other in an online game. Each participant read short anecdotes about the fortunes or misfortunes of other study participants, and rated how good or bad the anecdotes made them feel. With each anecdote, the team logo and colors of the person whose story it was appeared on the computer screen. Participants tended to feel much less empathy — less joy at the successes and less sorrow at the misfortunes — for members of the other team than for members of their own team or of a control group that hadn’t been assigned to any team. And as Bruneau hypothesized, the width of this empathy gap did not correlate with a person’s empathy rating on personality assessments; it was not wider in less empathetic people or narrower in more empathetic people.

What it did correlate with was the strength of a person’s group identity. “The more an individual’s team affiliation resonated for them, the less empathy they were likely to express for members of the rival team,” he says. “Even in this contrived setting, something as inconsequential as a computer game was enough to generate a measurable gap.”

In some ways the finding was not a surprise. Evidence of the empathy gap abounds: in political discourse, across daily headlines, even in the simple act of watching a movie. “People will cry for the suffering of one main character,” Bruneau pointed out. “But then cheer for the slaughter of dozens of others.” The observation reminded me of watching “Captain Phillips” in a packed theater at Lincoln Center, of how much people applauded when the Somali pirates — whose lives back home had been portrayed as dire — were killed. They were the bad guys. Never mind that they had barely reached manhood or that their families were desperate and starving. Never mind that some were reluctant to turn to piracy in the first place.

Back in 2010, while studying Israelis and Arabs living in the Boston area, Bruneau happened upon some unexpected data. Participants in the study read short letters about the Middle East published in local newspapers and rated how reasonable they thought each opinion was, while Bruneau scanned their brains. He’d noticed that a common sticking point in regional dialogues was that each side found the other ignorant or irrational or both. Bruneau wanted to see if those perceptions could be traced to a specific part of the theory-of-mind network.

For the most part, the results were as expected. Israeli subjects were more likely to harbor anti-Arab biases and to rate Arab perspectives as unreasonable, and vice versa. And in both groups, a small region of the brain, the medial precuneus, which may be associated with the theory-of-mind network, responded more strongly when the subject was reading letters written by members of the other group. But for three subjects, the psychological and neurological tests contradicted each other. The psychological tests indicated that they held the same types of anti-Arab biases as the other Israeli subjects, but their brain scans, and their reasonableness ratings, indicated that they were able to identify with the Arab perspective nonetheless. All three of these outliers, it turned out, were Israeli peace activists. In a scatter plot of the study’s results, in which blue dots represented the Israeli subjects and red dots represented the Palestinian ones, the peace activists stood out: three specks of blue in a quadrant of red.

The sample size was too small to make any broad inferences, but it set Bruneau on a quest of sorts. In Budapest, whenever he found himself chatting with Roma activists who were not themselves Roma, he would ask them why they wanted to help. He had a hunch that if he put any of these “non-Roma Roma” in the scanner, and then compared their results with those of other Hungarians, they, too, would end up as blue dots in a sea of red. He reasoned that something somewhere in their lives had overridden their implicit biases and moved them to behave with greater empathy toward the minority group. He wanted to know what that something was. “If we could figure out how it happens,” he said, “maybe we could harness it somehow.”

Bruneau is the first to admit that this is no simple task. For all the progress that has been made in neuroscience, he says, the human brain is still an enigma. He likens the brain to a human riding an elephant: The human rider is the part we can consciously access and control, and the elephant is the subliminal rest. “We know next to nothing about how the elephant works, or how to actually steer it,” he says. “But it exerts enormous influence on our behavior.”

Psychologists have developed a battery of tests to help them glimpse this elephant. The implicit association test, or I.A.T. (sometimes referred to as the “racist test” in popular culture), evaluates subconscious biases by measuring how long it takes a person to match certain words to certain images on a computer screen. Other tests have been designed to measure dehumanization, by gauging the extent to which we attribute higher-order, human-specific emotions to groups other than our own, or how evolved we deem a given racial group to be. They’re crude tests, to be sure, especially for a scientist trained in the precision of molecular biology. But Bruneau consoles himself with the trade-off. “The answers you get with psychology may be less final, and less satisfying in a way,” he says. “But the questions you get to ask are so much bigger.”

In Budapest, Bruneau planned to measure anti-Roma biases in a group of schoolteachers, and then to see how well those biases correlated to their treatment of Roma students and their support for Roma integration. The goal was to help NGOs and school administrators design more successful integration programs — programs that didn’t trigger political backlash or waves of white flight. “The idea is to intervene at the psychological level before we intervene at the societal level,” he said. “And then to see if doing that improves the success rate of various integration programs.”

Anna Kende, a social psychologist at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, is not as optimistic as Bruneau about the potential of psychological interventions to improve the Roma situation. “I appreciate his approach,” she told me. “But the problem is very complex.” Part of it has to do with the Roma themselves, she says. For three generations now, their communities have been blighted by unemployment and the poverty that comes with it. And their psyches have been frayed by that experience. Kende’s research suggests that children living in settlements understand social mobility and the mechanisms behind it: to have a nice life, you have to study hard so you can get a good job and buy a house. But they also understand that those paths are closed to them. When she asked students how they would afford a nice house and a family, many said they would have accidents and collect insurance money, or win at poker.

The Roma who do escape the settlements often shed their ethnic identities — either deliberately or by default. “So for example, the dominant group may accept a Roma who comes from the settlement and somehow makes it into college,” Kende says. “But it’s not, ‘Oh, now this changes my perception of Roma.’ It’s, ‘Oh, well that person is not really Roma.’ And then what you have left is, the word ‘Roma’ becomes shorthand for ‘dirty, lazy, thief.’ ” Those norms are so pervasive, she said, that the Roma themselves have adopted them. This was plain to see in the settlements I visited, where residents talked openly about expelling the lazy and the criminal alike. “We cannot protect people just because they are Roma,” one settlement dweller told me. “We have to throw out the bad elements.”

Marianna Pongo, who is Roma and grew up in Gusev, told me that at least some of the blame for the failure of Nyiregyhaza’s busing program lay with the Roma themselves. “They have behavioral problems,” she said one afternoon, as we sat in her kitchen over coffee and homemade cinnamon cookies. “The bus driver tried disciplining the kids at one point, because they were running around on the bus and he couldn’t drive. And when the kids got off the bus, they told their parents that the driver hit them. So the parents basically attacked the driver.” At another school, there were so many fights between kids from the two Roma settlements that a security guard had to be hired to maintain order. “I’m all for integration,” she said. “But I think it needs to be pointed out that some of the Roma act in ways that don’t help.”

Kende was not the only one feeling pessimistic. The Decade of Roma Inclusion — a multicountry initiative begun in 2005, as former Soviet-bloc countries like Hungary prepared for admission to the European Union — was drawing to a close, and the numbers were as dismal as they were at the start. According to the United Nations Development Program, about 90 percent of Europe’s 11 million or so Roma were still living below the poverty line; about 45 percent of Roma live in households that lack basic amenities like indoor toilets and electricity. In Hungary, Roma unemployment is estimated at 70 percent, or 10 times the national average. Worst of all, though, were the education statistics. Access to education was the initiative’s centerpiece, and desegregation programs received the most funding. Only one out of two Roma children attends preschool or kindergarten.

True, the decade was not a complete loss. Anti-discrimination laws were enacted, several high-profile court cases were won — including two in the European Court of Human Rights — and there were enough small-scale successes to suggest that desegregation was possible, even if systemwide gains remained elusive. But those gains had yet to be translated into meaningful change. “There are islands of fantastic integration,” Andras Ujlaky, executive director of the European Roma Rights Center, told me in a separate conversation. “But you can count them on one hand. And nobody seems to want to replicate them.”

A few days into our trip, Bruneau and I had lunch with two NGO workers — one Roma and one ethnic Hungarian — who were intrigued by but a bit skeptical of Bruneau’s plans. “So you’ll do this study,” said Gabor Daroczi, the executive director of Romaversitas Foundation, an NGO that offers scholarships and mentorships to help individual Roma students go to college. “And at the end you’ll have a nice research summary. What are the plans to do with the findings?” Bruneau explained that the pilot study was not an end in itself, and that the next step would be to develop actual psychological interventions, and then to test them to see which were most effective.

Daroczi sighed. He told me later that his doubts had much less to do with Bruneau’s project than with the state of Hungarian society. More and more, his country reminded him of George Orwell’s “1984.” The government made big statements and sweeping gestures in one direction but then almost immediately reversed itself. Any criticism was rejected wholesale. “Sometimes I think that even the very best research will only make things worse,” he said. “You may provide concrete evidence of racism, but being told by outsiders that they are racist and need to change will only inspire a fuller rejection of outsiders.”

Kornelia Magyar, director of the Hungarian Progressive Institute, thought the experiments sounded promising. She believed that racial prejudice was thwarting efforts to assimilate the Roma, and thought studies that exposed it could only help their cause. But she, too, was concerned about what the next steps might be. “Once you measure it,” she asked, “How do you change it?”

Bruneau said he thought the answer to that question might lie with non-Roma activists like her. And then he asked a question: What made her, an educated white woman, take up the Roma cause? This gave Magyar pause. After a brief silence, she explained that she grew up in a city close to the Austrian border and that she always felt like an outsider when her family would cross over to go shopping. Daroczi couldn’t help interjecting; after the fall of communism, he said, Hungarians crossed the border in droves, mostly to purchase basic goods. “It was written in Hungarian on the walls of the shops, ‘Hungarians: don’t steal!’ ” he said.

“It felt shameful,” Magyar added, nodding. “I think that really affected me.” Bruneau lit up at the anecdote; it was very similar to the stories he’d collected from other non-Roma activists. He told Magyar and Daroczi about the brain scans of the Israeli peace activists — the blue dots in a sea of red — and about his desire to somehow array the power of their experiences toward intervention efforts.

“Yes, but even that is tricky,” Magyar said. The way a person related her own experiences to the experiences of others was complicated, she said. “Sometimes those same experiences trigger the exact opposite reaction.”

In Gusev, the problems of integration seemed larger and more complex than any one scientific theory or NGO could address. With the lawsuit still pending against the school in Gusev, C.F.C.F. had been helping families transfer out individually. I joined Nikolett Suha, then an attorney with the organization, one afternoon in October, to meet a young woman named H., whose child, N., was a student at the segregated school. (H., fearing retaliation, asked that she and her child be identified by only their initials.) It was N.’s first year there. At first, H. was thrilled to accept the incentives the church offered to encourage enrollment: vouchers for the general store and at least some school supplies. But the five weeks since school started had brought a series of calamities for her child. N. came home with lice more than once and was pummeled in the schoolyard by an older student — an 11-year-old who was twice N.’s size — for reasons that H. had not been able to determine.

And if all of that were not enough, a rumor was circulating in Gusev that one of the fourth graders at the school had hepatitis, and that all students in that grade had been given shots to keep them from catching it. Some parents were angry that they hadn’t been told about the shots. Others were angry that only the fourth graders supposedly received them. What about the other students, they wondered. Weren’t they also at risk?

H. was hoping that the C.F.C.F. attorneys could get N. into the elementary school closest to Gusev. It was just 15 minutes away on foot and adjacent to a brand-new playground. But she was also very worried about cooperating with them. Earlier that week, H. said, the principal called her into the office and screamed at her, in front of some of the other parents. She accused H. of hitting a student who bullied her child. H. insisted that this wasn’t true, that she had only scolded the student for picking on N. But the principal said that there were witnesses, and that the police would be notified. “I think she’s offended that I want to move N. out of the school,” H. told Suha.

H.’s husband had only recently received a workfare contract — an assignment collecting garbage around Gusev — after a long stretch of unemployment. Work-for-welfare programs, which are mandated by the federal government and administered by the municipalities, are a main source of employment for Gusev’s residents, and the assignments were tough to come by. If word got back to the municipality that she had been involved in a police incident at the school, H. worried, her husband’s contract might be revoked.

For two nights after the confrontation, H. said, she paced the family home. On the third day, she sent her husband to the school to find out if the police had been called. The principal told him no, they hadn’t, and the next day gave her blessing for N.’s transfer. This provided only meager relief to H. Principals, it seemed, were as fickle as everyone else who held sway over the lives in Gusev. If they swung one way with such little prompting, couldn’t they just as easily swing the other? (According to C.F.C.F, H. has since been charged in criminal court with hitting the student.)

H.’s worries were not new to Suha. On each of her visits to settlement families, she confronted similar anxieties. “She’s very courageous,” Suha said as we walked from H.’s house, through Gusev and out the south entrance, then made our way over to the prospective school. “Some of the mothers want to transfer but are afraid of making trouble for themselves.”

C.F.C.F.’s main goal was to start persuading the schools closest to the settlement to accept students from Gusev on an individual basis. Getting moms like H. to apply was only half the solution. And, tough as it could be, it was not the more difficult half.

I waited on the front steps while Suha went in and spoke to the principal of the school into which H. hoped to transfer N. She emerged 40 minutes later, frowning. The principal was actually quite nice, she said. But the school would not be able to accept any students from Gusev. “She said there are already too many Roma kids in this school,” Suha explained. White flight is a common problem in newly integrated schools, and the principal, Suha said, admitted to being worried about what would happen if her school was suddenly flooded with settlement students. “She wants to preserve the quality of education there,” Suha said, as we made our way back to H.’s house. “She thinks, O.K., if I let this kid in, then in the next few weeks two or three more will come. And then the non-Roma parents will start taking their kids out. Her point is, either way, you end up with a segregated school. Because even if you change the law and change the practices, you still haven’t changed people’s minds.”

Bruneau hopes that neural focus groups might help determine which interventions are most likely to succeed. “We would get people in the lab to view a number of different candidate anti-Roma bias campaigns,” he said. “And then see which ones generated the greatest response in predefined brain regions.” Ideally, social scientists working in Hungary would determine which programs to measure, and Bruneau’s research would help evaluate and refine those programs. In psychology experiments he conducted, short narratives about individuals from rival groups proved particularly effective at getting opponents to empathize with one another. He imagined intervention programs that used narratives like these in a variety of ways.

But before any such collaboration could begin, people — not just Roma activists but parents and teachers and school administrators — would have to be persuaded that psychological biases were, in fact, the root of the problem: that they existed in the first place, that they were coloring individual perception and affecting attitudes and behaviors and that science could help change them. Bruneau appreciates how quixotic this sounds. “I get that these are complicated problems,” he told me. “I get that there isn’t going to be any one magic solution. But if you trace even the biggest of these conflicts down to its roots, what you find are entrenched biases, and these sort-of calcified failures of empathy. So I think no matter what, we have to figure out how to root that out.”

Jeneen Interlandi is a frequent contributor to the magazine. She is at work on an e-book about American-led syphilis experiments in Guatemala.

Reporting for this article was financed in part by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

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